SHOWERED WITH TROUBLE

All day, the men come to Angel Lara, bearing their latest worries and troubling rumors.

Is it true the banana fields will not be replanted? If the fields are left to rot, will they have any work?

And if there's no more work, will they have to move from their company-owned houses?

Lara, a deeply sunburned man who looks much older than his 46 years, heads the banana workers' union for a small, 320-employee finca, or plantation. Parked behind a table in the shade, he stares at them and shakes his head.

"We have to be united so we can overcome our situation," he says slowly, sheltered from a blistering sun by one of the red-rusted metal roofs that stretch out over the workers' plank houses.

But it will take much more than inner resolve for the workers of the Buena Vista plantation and Honduras' banana industry to surmount challenges that threaten to uproot a historic way of life in a country once dubbed The Banana Republic.

Though international trade disputes share some of the blame for imperiling the nation's banana plantations, the industry's biggest problems were caused by Hurricane Mitch, which blasted across this mountainous country of 6 million--Central America's poorest, with two out of three people living in poverty--more than a year ago.

The devastating storm killed at least 5,000 people and Honduran officials count several thousand others as still missing, 14 months after the hurricane blew through.

Nearly the entire banana crop was wiped out, equipment and facilities were destroyed, and acre after acre of ageless and valuable banana fields were severely damaged. Today, some roads leading to the lush, green low-lying banana fields remain impassable, deep-rutted monsters waiting to swallow up daring travelers.

Instead of immediately replanting the fields, the banana companies, led by two major U.S. giants, Cincinnati-based Chiquita Brands International Inc. and Dole Food Co. Inc. of West Lake Village, Calif., sat still for several months. They were not sure what fields could be used, and a depressed market gave them little incentive to rush ahead.

Bananas rank third in importance behind coffee and manufacturing in Honduras' feeble economy; the industry accounted for $176 million in exports last year. That was down 17 percent from 1997. The sudden loss of the crop as well as the thousands of jobs tied to the industry has been crippling.

Chiquita, the world's largest banana producer, has since replanted 40 percent of its fields, or about 7,410 acres, and company executives say that is about twice as much as their competitors have reclaimed.

At first, Hondurans feared that the U.S. companies would pull out, especially because of new competition from Ecuador, where costs are even lower. The U.S. companies have since reassured Honduran officials they will remain.

But they have also told the banana workers' unions they will no longer use some fields that face flooding risks and will shift to growing African palm oil trees in some areas.

Fewer workers are needed to care for palm trees, and so the unions fear for their members' fate.

Steven Warshaw, Chiquita's president and chief operating officer, speaking from company headquarters, is reluctant to commit his company to gearing back up to business as it once was in Honduras.

"It is hard to say right now," he explains. "We have to deal with the realities of the worldwide banana market and the industry on a worldwide basis is going through a difficult time."

Blaming stiff competition, his company recently told Wall Street that it expects its earnings for the fourth quarter to slump even more dramatically than analysts had predicted. It said its net loss might reach $82 million for the quarter.

Before Hurricane Mitch, Chiquita had about 6,100 workers involved in banana production alone. Now, it has 1,300 workers, though the company says it expects to have at least 3,000 in a few months. As many as 3,000 workers have already left the company, taking their severance payments with them.

"Not all of our workers will get their jobs back," predicts Miriam Reyes, an official in La Lima with the union that represents Chiquita's workers. It is one of seven unions that represent banana workers in Honduras.

These days, an air of desolation hangs over the union's headquarters in La Lima.

Stacked in the union's musty, hushed hallways are food supplies from charities and foreign donors for jobless workers. The hurricane threw the union into a crisis too. Out of work, its members can no longer pay their dues, and without that income, the union has not been able to pay its bills or salaries, Reyes says.

And then there is the nasty banana war that has raged between the United States and the European Union, which represents the world's largest banana market.

Furious that the Europeans were using quotas to block bananas grown by U.S. firms in Latin America, the Clinton administration retaliated in March with 100 percent tariffs on $195 million worth of European items, many of them luxury products.

And the Europeans, who imposed the quotas to favor bananas grown by their former colonies in the Caribbean, Africa and the Pacific, stood firm. Officials were cheered on by Europeans who accused the White House of acting as the bully for giant U.S. banana firms.

The Europeans relented, however, and recently offered to phase out their restrictions by 2006.

But the White House and allied Latin American governments rejected the deal. They said it was not only vague, but still favored the former European colonies by putting tariffs on Latin American bananas and not on theirs.

The uncertainties facing the banana industry trouble Juan Antonio Bendeck, a leading businessman and personal adviser to Honduran President Carlos Roberto Flores Facusse.

"The companies still want to grow here, but they are worried about the market, and they are worried about what's going to happen in Europe," says Bendeck, who recently met with officials from the major banana companies.

His construction company and other businesses are based in El Progresso, a city just north of San Pedro Sula, Honduras' financial center. Shrouded by green mountains, the city sits in the heart of a vast expanse of banana fields. It is a place where the banana industry's collapse, as Bendeck explained, has put almost everything on hold.

"Money is not circulating," he says, sitting in an office for his stylish gift shop for tourists, where there are no tourists on hand.

At the turn of the century, American companies came to these fields in Honduras' northern coast. They spread their roots, expanded their political clout and eventually owned three-fourths of the nation's banana groves.

Except for some modest changes, the fields and way of life have barely changed.

It's an idyllic-seeming world of green fields, an endless green carpet of banana trees and thickly forested mountains that rise up suddenly from a lush valley. Wisps of clouds meander among the mountains, moving back and forth like veils, temporarily shielding the stunning beauty behind them.

But it's nirvana in image only.

Several miles outside of the city--down narrow, deeply rutted roads and across giant rain-swollen washes that make it impossible for most cars to pass--sits the Buena Vista plantation, a testament to the tribulations still suffered from Mitch, and the meager world of the banana worker.

When the hurricane's rains and flooding ruined the plantation in October 1998, everyone fled temporarily to the second-floor of their bare-bones houses and then swam to safety and higher land. Meanwhile, the surging waters swept away most of their possessions--and many of the banana trees that nurtured them for decades.

When they returned, they lived off handouts from charities and the government for months. Then Chiquita gave them permission to grow corn and other basics on open areas near the banana fields. What little they had left over from their crops, they were allowed to sell.

Only a few months ago, Chiquita lent some of the men out to work with another company. By then, most of the younger workers had left, saying the plantation would never be the same. Lately, the remaining workers have begun replanting parts of the plantation's fields with bananas.

"Who knows where the workers went," says Armando Fuentes, 41, who has wielded a machete in the banana fields since he was a teenager. His 66-year-old father is still a banana worker, and Fuentes long thought his seven sons and daughters would do the same work.

Now, however, Fuentes, a small man who seems weighed down with worry, is not so sure about what lies ahead.

Desperate for money after the hurricane, Fuentes sent his second-oldest child, 17-year-old daughter Alicia, to work in the foreign-owned garment factories in nearby Progresso. "We needed the money," he says. Because it is illegal for anyone under 18 years old to work full-time in Honduras, she used fake working papers to get her job.

And as soon as his other children look old enough, Fuentes said, they too will trek to the factories, where workers typically sit beside sewing machines, working from eight to 13 hours daily, stitching underwear and T-shirts. "They will get fake papers too," Fuentes says.

Beginners are paid about $27 a week in the factories. Alicia makes about $48 a week, working 14 hours a day at a garment factory owned by South Koreans, where most of the workers are young women. But she doesn't seem to mind her job, which takes her for the first time beyond the world of the plantation to a giant factory guarded by machine-toting guards.

"They [the foreign managers] just yell at us," says the teenager, who quit school when she was 15 years old. "But we don't understand what they are saying, so we do our work."

As low as that weekly salary may seem to anyone in the United States, a veteran banana worker like Fuentes makes only about $4 a day for a six-day week, a wage that has barely grown in the last few years. But he also gets a free home and free health care from Chiquita.

From what he hears about plantations closing down or trimming back on workers, Fuentes says he believes that his own days in the banana fields are numbered.

That is why he dreams almost daily, he says, of picking up on his own and making his way illegally to Miami. He says he knows other Hondurans who have found work in Florida, and he figures he can do farming work once he arrives there.

What he has not figured out is how he will get to the United States. He tried a while ago, and after traveling dozens of miles through mountain trails, robbers in Guatemala stole everything he had-- $80. A smuggler, or coyote, would charge him about $4,000 to carry him all the way to the United States.

It is money he clearly does not have. But it is dangerous, as he says he has learned, to go alone.

"There's no way of doing things right in Honduras," he says, swatting away a fly as he sits, watching his wife, Egly, grill some meat on tree branches over a primitive oven. "I'm going to get a visa or I'm just going to go to the United States," he adds, resolutely.

Just beyond the clump of workers' houses, where most families are stuffed into two narrow rooms each, a small road winds by a river. When Mitch hit, the river roared up and swallowed banks of earth that had long protected the banana fields.

The banks are now gone, and the river is the color of coffee with cream, the result of recent rains and flooding.In the nearby fields, small, green bananas have replaced the brightly colored blossoms that bore them, and the bananas are slowly ripening in white plastic bags meant to protect them against insects. Even though a bright sun is baking down, a cooling breeze circulates beneath the trees' broad leaves.